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English • Classic • Series 



i-i_i^i_i-i-i-i-i^t-i^i-i-.i^ 




.: BY :— 

Charles Lamb. 



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r NEW YOEK: ^ 

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KELLOGG'S EDITIONS. 

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Text Carefully Expurgated for Use in Mixed Classes. 

With Portrait^ Hotes^ Introduction to Shakespeare's Grammar, 
Examination Paj)ers, and Plan of Study. 

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By BRAINEED KELLOGG, A.M., 

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Institute, and author oj a " Text-Book on Rhetoric,''^ a " Text-Book on 

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ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES.— No. 88. 



The Essays of Elia, 



By CHAELES LAMB. 

Hi 



SELECTIONS 



A Dissertation on Roast Pig. 
Detached Thoughts on Books 
AND Reading. 



The South-Sea House. 
Old China. 



213^itf) Kntrotiuctioit anJr Hotes, 

\ BY 

Louis Augustus Bakrt, LL.D. 




NEW YORK: 

Effingham Maynakd & Co., Publishers, 

771 Broadway and 67 & 69 Ninth Street. 



4 TNTEODUCTIOTf. 

father survived but a few montlis; a sister of his who had formed 
one of the family died about the same time. Thus Charles and 
Mary, who had meantime recovered her reason, were left practi- 
cally alone in the world; for their brother John held aloof, desir- 
ing that Mary should remain in the asylum. Charles had had an 
attack of insanity in the winter of 1795-6; it was, perhaps, in con- 
sequence of this, and the care of his sister, that he gave up the 
idea of marrying the Anna of his sonnets. He had no return of 
the madness, bui Mary had frequent relapses, the approach of 
which she felt in time to enable her to retire to the lunatic 
asylum. 

It was in 1796 that Lamb first appeared as an author, when four 
sonnets by him were published in a volume of Coleridge's 
poems. 

Lamb's first attempt in prose, exclusive of letters, was the tale 
of Rosamund Gray (1798), incongruous and improbable, showing 
the author's weakness in narrative, but exhibiting the pathos, 
quaintness of description and appropriateness of quotation which 
form the excellence of the Essays of Mia. Of it Shelley wrote: 
" What a lovely thing is his Rosamund Gray ! How much 
knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature is in it!" 
In the same year he wrote what is perhaps the best known of his 
poems, the first stanza of which he afterwards omitted — 

"Where are they gone, the old familiar faces ? 
I had a mother, but she died and left m.e — 
Died prematurely in a day of horrors- 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

For the first seventeen years of the present century, Charles and 
Mary Lamb resided within the precincts of the Temple; first 'in 
Mitre Court Buildings, then in Inner Temple Lane. At the be- 
ginning of this period, Charles was employed as an occasional 
writer of trifles for newspapers, but he soon attempted more am- 
bitious work. 

Rosamund Gray had shown that he was defective in the quali- 
ties which a novelist and a dramatist alike must possess. 

In 1806 Lamb succeeded in getting a farce accepted at Drury 
Lane. The following year was published the collection of Tales 
from Shakespeare, the comedies by Mary Lamb, the tragedies by 
Charles. This was for both a congenial task, and one for which, 



INTROI^UCTION. 5 

from the special bent of their studies, they were thoroughly- 
qualified. 

With the exception of Shakespeare, the Elizabethan dramatists 
and without exception those of the following half century, were 
unknown to the public of eighty years ago. A rich literary 
mine was opened to them in Lamb's Specimens of English Dra- 
matic Poets contemporary loitJi Shakespeare; and the notes which 
he added placed him in the first rank of critics. 

In 181 7 the brother and sister left the Temple for the second 
time and took lodgings in great Russell Street, Co vent Garden, 
and next year a collective edition of Lamb's works appeared in 
two volumes. 

In January, 1820, appeared the first monthly part of London 
Magazine, though it numbered among its contributors the most 
eminent literary men of the day, it was never a pecuniary success, 
and in 1826 ceased to exist. For it Lamb wrote some forty-five 
essays, beginning in 4.ugust, 18'20, with the one entitled The South 
Sea House; this he signed with the pseudonym Elia, the name of 
the Italian already mentioned as engaged in the South Sea House, 
but of whom nothing further is known. This word, Lamb tells 
us, ought to be pronounced EU-ia. He continued to employ this 
nom de plume, and in 1823 a collection of the essays which had 
up to that time appeared, was published under the title of Essays 
of Elia. 

Owing chiefly to the greater frequency of Mary Lamb's attacks 
they gave up housekeeping in 1829, and boarded at a house in the 
same neighborhood. In 1833 they made their last move to the 
house of Mr. and Mrs. Walden, at Edmonton, that Mary might 
be continually under their care. 

Coleridge died the following year. ' ' Coleridge is dead, " Lamb 
kept repeating; and he survived his friend but a few mouths. A 
slight hurt on the face, caused by a fall, brought on an attack of 
erysipelas, and his life ended December 27, 1834. Mary survived 
until 1847. 

Though, according to Leigh Hunt, "there never was a true 
portrait of Lamb," we have descriptions by Talfourd, Procter, 
Hood and others, which enable us to picture him in imagination: 
"A light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a breath would 
overthrow it, clad in clerk-like black, was surmounted by a head 
of form and expression the most noble and sweet. His black hajr 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

curled crisply about an expanded forehead; liis.eyes, softly 
brown, twinkled with varying expression, though thp prevalent 
feeling was sad; and the nose slightly curved, and delicately 
carved at the nostril, with the lower outline of the face regularly 
oval, completed a head which was finely placed on the shoulders, 
and gave importance and even dignity to a diminutive and shad- 
owy stem. Who shall describe his countenance, catch its quiver- 
ing sweetness, and fix it for ever in words ? There are none, 
alas, to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, 
striving with humor; the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial 
mirth; and a smile of painful sweetness, present an image to the 
mind it can as little describe as lose. His personal appearance 
and manner are not unfitly characterized by what he himself saj's 
in one of his letters to Manning, of Braham, ' a compound of the 
Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.' " 

So Talfourd describes him; and all who knew him intimately 
note his gravity, sadness and sweetness. Lamb's natural shyness 
produced a false impression upon strangers, before whom he was 
either silent or gave utterance to ideas and sentiments quite un- 
true to his nature. In a Preface to the second series of the 
Essays of Elia, Lamb gives what purports to be a character of 
Elia. It is of himself that he really makes the following re- 
marks : — 

" My late friend was in many respects a singular character. 
Those who did not like him, hated him; and some, who once 
liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, 
he gave himself too little concern what he uttered, and in whose 
presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would e'ea 
out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionists he 
would pass for a free-thinker; while the other faction set him 
down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sen- 
timents. Few understood him, and I am not certain that at all 
times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that 
dangerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and 
reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would interrupt the grav- 
est discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite 
irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your long and much 
talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an 
inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an orator; 
and he seemed determined that no one else should play that part 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person 
and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called 
good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent and 
be suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky occasion pro- 
voking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether 
senseless, perhaps, if rightly taken) which has stamped his char- 
acter for the evening. It was hit or miss with him; but nine 
times out of ten he contrived by this device to send away a whole 
company his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his 
utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of 
eifort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth 
he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He 
chose his companions for some individuality of character which 
they manifested. Hence not many persons of science, and few 
professed literati, were of his councils. They were, for the most 
part, persons of an uncertain fortune; and as to such people com- 
monly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled 
(though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a 
great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intima- 
dos, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regiment. 
He found them floating on the surface of society; and the color, 
or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to 
him; but they were good and loviug burrs for all that. He 
never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. 
If any of these were scandalized (and offenses were sure to arise) 
he could not help it. When he has been remonstrated with for 
not making more concessions to the feelings of good people, he 
would retort by asking what one point did these good people ever 
concede to him ? He was temperate in his meals and diversions, 
but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in 
the use of the Indian weed he might be, thought a little excessive. 
He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry — as the 
friendly vapor ascended, how his prattle would curl up some- 
times with it ! the ligaments which tongue-tied him were loosened, 
and the stammerer proceeded a statist I" 

Lamb's generosity was great, even in the days of his pecuniary 
difficulties; and as his income increased he gave more and more 
liberally to all who needed help. Kor did he confine himself to 
giving money, but whenever he could be of use spared neither 
time nor trouble. He spent little on himself, and before he knew 



<5 INTRODUCTION. 

that the directors of the India House would grant his sister a pen- 
sion, he had laid by £2,000 for her. 

Lamb's position in literature is a remarkable one. We have 
seen that he was not a dramatist; he could not, like Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, or such modern novelists as Thackeray and Dickens 
throw himself into, and depict with truth, various characters. 
He could not construct a plot; he had no idea of unity of action. 
He was not, on the other hand, a subjective poet, lU^e Byron and 
Shelley, whom he neither understood nor liked. He could not 
give utterance to great emotions, which were not in his nature. 
What he could do, and what he did to perfection in the Essays of 
Elia, was to seize on the salient features, good or bad, in individ- 
uals or in institutions, and show them to the world in that terse, 
expressive style which he imbibed in his earliest childhood from 
the old English pre-restoration authors, whose works he found in 
Mr. Salt's library. He must not be regarded as a plagiarist or as 
a mere echo of that literary period, but rather as a distinct and 
noteworthy genius of the same school. H Lamb uses their lan- 
guage, it is because he has made that language his own; if he 
quotes them, as he does so often, the very inaccuracy of his quo- 
tations proves how spontaneous they were. 

His limitations as a critic are well put by Mr. Ainger: " Where 
his heart was, there his judgment was sound. Where he actively 
disliked, or was passively indifferent, his critical powers remained 
dormant. He was too fond of paradox, too much at the mercy of 
his emotions or the mood of the hour, to be a safe guide always. 
But where no disturbing forces interfered, he exercised a faculty 
almost unique in the history of criticism." 

The Essays of Elia are in great part biographical ; but so much 
does Lamb delight to mystify the reader, that he maizes numer- 
ous fictitious statements, and when he records facts he hints that 
he is inventing. He delights to alter names and dates, and even 
to speak of the same person under different names in different es- 
says. Were it not for outside information we should be at a loss 
to distinguish truth from fiction. 

Not only ought the study of these selected Essays to lead to a 
more thorough investigation of the Essays of Elia, but Lamb 
ought to be regarded as an easy introduction to those authors who 
were his models and in whose works the English language arrived 
at maturity. 



SELECTIONS FEOM CHAELES LAMB. 



A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig. 

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. 
was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first 
seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it 
from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this 
day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great 
Confucius in the second chapter of his "Mundane Mutations," 
where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho- 
f ang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to 
say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to 
be the elder-brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner lo 
following. The swineherd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the 
woods one morning, as his manner w^as, to collect mast for his 
hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son. Bo-bo, a 
great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as 
younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into 
a bundle of straw which, kindling quickly, spread the conflag- 
ration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was re- 
duced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry ante- 
diluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was 
of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, 20 
no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been 
esteemed a luxury all over the east, from the remotest periods 
that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as 
you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, 
which his father and he could easily build up again with a few 

1. Says a Chinese Manuscript. A dignified manner of attempting to 
give the appearance of historic accuracy to the rest of the narrative.' 
12. Mast. Literally, nourishment. Here referring to nuts, acorns, etc. 
15, Yo-ankers. Youngsters, a colloquial term applied to young persons. 

9 



10 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as 
for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should 
say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking 
remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed 

30 his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. 
What could it proceed from ? — not from the burnt cottage— he 
had smelt that smell before — indeed this was by no means the 
first accident of the kind which had occurred through the 
negligence of this unlucky young fire-brand. Much less did it 
resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A pre- 
monitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether 
lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to 
feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt 
his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby 

40 fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched 
skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in 
his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had 
known it) he tasted — crackling ! Again he felt and fumbled 
at the pig. It did not burn him so much now ; still he licked 
his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke 
into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, 
and the pig that tasted so delicious ; and, surrendering him- 
self up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole 
handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was 

50 cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his 
sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory 
cudgel, aud finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows 
upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, 
which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. 
The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower 
regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences 
he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay 

26. A few dry branches and tlie labor of an hour or two. A defini- 
tion of what is above dignified by the name of mansion. 

39. Booby. Dunce, derived from the name given to a species of water- 
fowls that are regarded as stupid. The word is suggestive of the origin of 
Bo-bo's name. 

43. Crackling. The rind of roasted pork. 

48. Fumbled. Well illustrating how accidental was the discovery that 
followed. 



SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 11 

^on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly 
made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of 
his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued. 60 

"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? 
Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses 
with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be 
eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got there, I 
say ? " 

' ' O father, the pig, the pig ! do come and taste how nice 
the burnt pig eats." 

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, 
and he cursed himself, that ever he should beget a son that 
should eat burnt pig. 70 

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morn- 
ing, soon raked out another, pig, and fairly rending it asunder, 
thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still 
shouting out, " Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father ; only taste 
— O Lord!"— with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cram- 
ming all the while as if he would choke. 

Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the abomin- 
able thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to 
death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling 
scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's and applying the 80 
same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavor, 
which, make what sour mouths he would for pretense, proved 
not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the 
manuscript here is a little tedious), both father and son fairly 
sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had de- 
spatched all that remained of the litter. 

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for 
the neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple 
of abominable wretches, t^ho could think of improving upon 
the good meat which God had sent them. ISTevertheless, go 
strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cot- 
tage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing 
but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in 

QH. Me, Observe grammatical construction, 



12 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

broad day, others in tbe niglit-time. As often as the sow 
farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze : 
and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead 
of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him 
than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery 
discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial. 

loo at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was 
given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict 
about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged 
that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, 
might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all 
handled it ; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father 
had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them 
the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the 
clearest charge which judge had ever given,— to the surprise 
of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all 

iio present — without leaving the box, or any manner of consult- 
ation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of not 
guilty. 

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest 
iniquity of the decision ; and when the court was dismissed, 
went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for 
love or money. In a few days his Lordship's town-house was 
observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there 
was nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel and 
pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. •" The insurance- 

lao offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and 
slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of 
architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus 
this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, 
says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made 
a discovery, that the fiesh of swine, or indeed of any other 
animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the 
necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first 
began the rude form of a gridiron. Boasting by the string, or 



119. The insurance offices. An anachronism that only lends to the ab- 
surdity ol: the whole paragraph. 



SELECTIONS F^O^ CHARLES LAME. 13 

spit, came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. 
By sucli slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most 13° 
useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts, make their way 
among mankind. 

Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, 
it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous 
an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these 
days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that 
pretext and excuse might be found in roast pig. 

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will 
maintain it to be the most delicate— pW/zceps obsonioru^n. 

I speak not of your grown porkers — -things between pig and m© 
pork— those hobbydehoys — but a young and tender suckling — 
under a moon old— guiltless as yet of the sty — with no original 
speck of the ammmor iunditice, the hereditary failing of the 
first parent, yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, but 
something between a childish treble and a grumble— the mild 
forerunner, or prceludium, of a grunt. 

He must he roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors 
ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the ex- 
terior tegument ! 

There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the 15° 
crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it 
is well called— the very teeth are invited to their share of the 
pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resist- 
ance — with the adhesive oleaginous — oh call it not fat ! but an 
indefinable sweetness growing up to it — the tender bloFSoming 
of fat— fat cropped in the bud — taken in the shoot — in the 
firsf innocence — the cream and quintessence of the child-pig's 
yet pure food — the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna 
— or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and 
running into each other, that both together make but one 160 
ambrosian result, or common substance. 

138. Mundus edibilis. Literally, the edible world, the sum total of all 
things eatable. 

139. Princeps obsoniorum. The chief of delicacies. 
143. Amor iminunditise. Love of uncleanness. 
146. Praeludium. Prelude. 

150. Note the mock heroic throughout this and the following paragraph, 



14 SELECTIONS FEOM CHARLES LAMB. 

Behold him, while he is "doing" — it- seemeth rather a re- 
freshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive 
to. How equably he twirleth round the string ! — Now he is just 
done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age ! he 
hath wept out his pretty eyes— radiant jellies — shooting 
stars. 

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth ! 
— wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the gross- 
i7onessand indocility which too often accompany maturer swine- 
hood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, 
an obstinate disagreeable animal — wallowing in all manner of 
lilthy conversation — from these sins he is happily snatched 
away — 

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, 
Death came with timely care — 

his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his 
stomachhalf rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coalheaver bolteth 
in reeking sausages — he hath a fair sepulcher in the grateful 

i8o stomach of the judicious epicure — and for such a tomb might 
be content to die. 

He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed 
almost too transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, yet so like 
to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced person would do 
well to pause — too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth 
and excoriateth the lips that approach her — like lovers' kisses, 
she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the 
fierceness and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the 
palate — she meddleth not with the appetite — and the coarsest 

190 hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton chop. 

Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative of the 
appetite, than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the cen- 
sorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and 
the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. 

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues 
and vices, inexplicably intertwisted and not to be unraveled 



182. Sapors. Flavors. 
193. Batten. Fatten, 



SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 15 

witliout hazard, he is — good throughout. No part of him is 
better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little 
means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. 
He is all neighbors' fare. aoo 

I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share 
of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as 
mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great 
an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper 
satisfactions, as in mine own. " Presents," I often say, "en- 
dear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn- 
door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, 
brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive 
them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my 
friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, 210 
like Lear, "give everything." I make my stand upon pig. 
Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors, 
to extradomiciliate, or send out of the house slightingly 
(under pretext of friendship, or I know not w^hat), a blessing 
so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individ- 
* ual palate. It argues an insensibility. 

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. 
My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a 
holiday without stuffing a sweet-meat, or some nice thing, into 
my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking 220 
plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my w^ay to school (it was 
over London Bridge) a gray-headed old beggar saluted me (I 
have no doubt at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). 
I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self- 
denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, schoolboy-like, I 
made him a present of— the whole cake! I walked on a little, 
buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing 
of self-satisfaction ; but before I had got to the end of the 
bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, 
thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go 230 

205. Presents endear absents. Note the play upon words. 

207. Villatic. Pertaining 10 a vi'lage. 

209. Brawn. The meat of the boar. 

211. Lear. Shakespeare's character King Lear. 



16 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

aud give her good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen 
before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew ; and 
then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in 
thinking that I — I myself and not another — would eat her 
nice cake — and what should I say to her the next time I saw 
her — how naughty I was to part with her pretty present !— 
and the odor of that spicy cake came back upon rby recollec- 
tion, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing 
her make it, and her joy when she had sent it to the oven, and 

240 how disappointed she would "feel that I had never had a bit 
of it in my mouth at last— and I blamed my impertinent spirit 
of alms-giving, and out-of -place hypocrisy of goodness ; and 
above 'all, I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, 
good-for-nothing, old gray impostor. 

Our ancestors were nice in their method of. sacrificing these 
tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with some- 
thing of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. 
The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to in- 
quire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process 

250 might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, 
naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It 
looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while 
we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of 
the practice. It might impart a gusto. 

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young stu- 
dents, when I was at St. Omer's and maintained with much 
learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, supposing 
that the flavor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping 
{per flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon 

260 the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering 
we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that 
method of putting the animal to death ?" I forget the decision. 
His sauce should be considered — decidedly a few bread 
crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild 
sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole 



250. IntJiierating. Making tender. Dulcifying. Making sweet. 
;;59. Per flagellationeiu extreinam. Through excessive whipphig. 



SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 17 

onion tribe. Barbecue your whr)le hogs to your palate, steep 
them in shallots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank 
and guilty garlic ; you cannot poison them, or make them 
stronger than they are — but consider he is a weakling---a 
flower. ^1° 



Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading. 

To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced 
product of another man's brain. Now I tliink a man of quality and breeding 
may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.— Z/Ord Fopping- 
ton^ in '' The Relapse.'''' 

An ingenious acquaintance of ray own was so much struck 
with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off read- 
ing altogether, to the great impi'ovement of his originality. At 
the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess 
that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other 
people's thoughts. I dream away my life in other's specula- lo 
tions. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I 
am not walking, I am reading ; I cannot sit and think. Books 
think for me. 

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for 
me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I 
call a hook. There are things in that shape which I cannot 
allow for such. 

In this catalogue of hooks wMcIiare no hooks — hihlia a-hihlia 
— I reckon Court Calendars, Directorie3, Pocket Books (the 
Literary excepted). Draught Boards bound and lettered on the 20 
back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large : the 



4. The Relapse, a comedy, by Sir John Vanbrugh (1666-1726). Lord 
Foppington, one of the characters, is an empty coxcomb. 

14. Shaftesbury (1671-1713). Third Ear]. Author of Characteristics of 
Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times. 

15. Jonathan Wild, the history of a police spy, an ironical panegyric, in- 
tended to expose '• the motives which actuate the unprincipled great in every 
walk and sphere of life." The author, who is mentioned further on in this 
Essay, was Henry Fielding (1707-1754), whose greatest novel was Tom Jones 
(1749), also mentioned in this Essay. 

18. Biblla a-biblia. (Gk.) books, not-books; j.e. which do not deserve 
the title. 

20. Literary excepted. Lamb was a contributor to the Literary Pocket- 
book, 



18 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, 
and generally, all those volumes which ' ' no gentleman's library 
should be without :" the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that 
learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. "With these 
exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for 
a taste so catholic, so unexcludiug. 

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in 
hooks' clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers 

30 of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the 
legitimate occupants. To reach down a well- bound semblance 
of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted playbook, then, 
opening what " seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering 
Population Essay. To expect a Steele or a Farquhar, and find 
— Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of block- 
headed encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out 
in an array of Russia or morocco, when a tithe of that good 
leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios, would 
renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully 

40 to look like himself again in the world. I never see these im- 
postors, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans 
in their spoils. 



22. Hume, David (1711-1776), author of the well known History of Eng- 
land, and a Treatise on Hiivian Nature. 

82. Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794), noted for his great history of the Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Eriipire. 

22. Robertson, William (\'!21-Vl[9i^),ai\xt\iOT ot History of Scotland, during 
the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI., History of the Reign of 
Charlfs v., History of America. 

22. Beattie. James (1785-1803), a poet, author of the Minstrel. 

22. Soanie Jenyns (1704-1787J, author of Enquiry into the Origin of Evil, 
and Vieio of the Internal Evidences of the Christian Religion. 

24. Flavius Josephus, author of Antiquities of the Jeios, and Wars of 
the Jews. He died about a.d. 100. 

25. Paley, William (1743-1805), author of Principles of Moral and Political 
Philosophy (1785), alluded to here. 

27. Catholic, in the literal sense, universal. 

34. Population Essay, probably referring: to the Essay on the Principle 
of Poptdation, by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). . 

34. Steele, Sir -Richard (1675-1729). Founder of the periodicals TafZer, 
Spectator, Guardian, and author of several comedies. 

34. Farquhar, George (1678-1707), a dramatist. 

35. Adam Smith (1720-1790), founder of the science of Pohtical Economy. 
39. Paracelsus, Philip Aureolus Theophrastus (1493-1541), a native of 

Switzerland, a wandering quack physician and a diligent chemist. He ex- 
cited animosity by opposing the theory and practice of medicine in vogue in 
his time. 

39. Raymund liully (1234-1315). Author ot A rs Magna, The great idea 
of his life was the conversion of the Mussulmans. 



SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 19 

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a 
volume. Magnificence comes after. This' when it can be af- 
forded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscrimi- 
nately. I would not dress a set of magazines, for instance, 
in full suit. The dishabille or half-binding (withKussia backs 
ever) ii ow custom. A Shakespeare or a Milton (unless the 
first editions), i^ were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. 
The possession of them confers no distinction. The exterior 50 
of them (the things themselves being so common), strange to 
say, raises no sw^eet emotions, no tickling sense of property in 
the owner Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain 
it) a little torn and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine 
lover of reading are the sullied leaves and worn-out appear- 
ance, nay, the very odor (beyond Russia) if we would not 
forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating 
Librarj'," Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield ! How they speak 
of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with 
delight ! of the lone seamstress, wiiom they may have cheered 60 
(milliner, or hard-working mantua-maker) after her long day's 
needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched 
an hour^ ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some 
Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents ! Who 
would have them a whit less soiled ? What better condition 
could wo desire to see them in ? 

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands 
from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class 
of perpetually self-reproductive volumes — Great Nature's 
Stereotypes — we see them individually perish with less regret, 70 
because we know the copies of them to be "eterne." But 

48. Shakespeare (1564-1616), generally admitted to be the greatest creator 
of characters. 

48. Milton (1608-1674), not in the least a dramatist, but the greatest Eng- 
lish epic poet. Of his prose works, the Areopagitica, in favor of unlicensed 
printing, is the most celebrated. 

53. Thomson's Seasons. Besides the Seasons, James Thomson (1700-1748) 
wrote Liberty, The Castle of Indolence, and some plays. 

58. Vicar "of Wakefield (1766), the well-known hovel, by Oliver Gold- 
smith (1728-1774). 

61. Mantiia-inaker, dressmaker. 

64. Lethean, causing to forget. 

68. Smollett, Tobias (1721-1771), a novelist, contemporary with Fielding, 

68. Sterne. See Essay on My Relations, 

71, Eterne, old form of eternal. 



20 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

where a book is at once both good and rare — where the indi- 
vidual is almost the species, and when that perishes, 

We kDOw not where is that Promethean torch 
That can its light relumine— 

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of New- 
castle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing 
sufficiently durable, to honor and keep safe such a jewel. 
Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hope- 

80 less ever to be reprinted, but old editions of writers, such as 
Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor. Milton in his prose works. 
Fuller— of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, 
though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we 
know — have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever 
will) in the national heart, so as to become stock books — it is 
good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not 
care for a First Folio of Shakespeare. [You cannot make a joe^ 
book of an author whom everybody reads.] I rather prefer 
the common editions of Kowe and Tonson, without notes, and 

90 with plates, which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps or 
modest remembrancers to the text; and without pretending 
to any supposable emulation with it, are so much better than 
the Shakespeare gallery engravings, which did. I have a com- 
munity of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays, and I 
like those editions of his best which have been oftenest tum- 
bled about and handled. On the contrary, I cannot read 
Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are 
painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they 
were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I 

75. We know not Imperfectly remembered from Othello, 

" I know not where is that Promethean heat 
That can thy light relume." 

81. Sir Philip Sydney, better written Sidney (1554-1586), kiUed at the bat- 
tle of Zutphen. 

81. Bishop Taylor (1613-1667). Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and 
Connor, author of Holy Living. Hohj Di/iiig, etc. 

82. Fuller. See Essay on '• Christ's Hospital," note 151. 

84. Endenizens'rt, made themselves denizens or naturalized citizens of. 

89. Tonson, publisher of Rowe's, Pope's, and Theobald's editions of 
Shakspere. 

97. Beaumont and Fletcher, dramatists, who, working together, pro- 
duced thirteen plays, the best known of which are Philster, The Maid's Trag- 
edy, A King and no King, The Knight of the Burning Featle, 



SELECTIONS FR6m CHARLES LAMB. 21 

should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not loo 
know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy 
of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the bones 
of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding- 
sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure ? What hap- 
less stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular ? 
The wretched Malone could not do worse when he bribed the 
sexton of Stratford Church to let him whitewash the painted 
effigy of old Shakespeare, w^hich stood there, in rude but lively 
fashion depicted, to the very color of the cheek, the eye, the 
eyebrow, hair, the very dress he used to wear — the only an- no 
thentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious 
parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat 

of white paint. By , if I had been a justice of peace for 

Warwickshire, I would have clapped both commentator and 
sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious 
varlets. 

I think I see them at their work — these sapient troubletombs. 

Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess that the names of 
some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the 
ear — to mine, at least — than that of Milton or of Shakespeare ? 120 
It may be that the latter are more staled and rung upon in 
common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a 
perfume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond 
of Hawthornden, and Cowley. 

Much depends upon when and inhere you read a book. In 
the five 01 six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite 
ready^ who would think of taking up the Faerie Queene, for a 
stop-gap, 01 a volume of Bishop Andrews sermons ? 

106. Malone, Edmund (1741-1 81 2), a Shakespearian editor and commentator. 

116. Varleti now used contemptuously, but originally a youth or groom. 

123. Kit Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe (1.564-1593), the dramatist, under 
the influence of whose majestic, but often bombastic style, Shakespeare com- 
posed his earliest historical plays. 

123. Drayton, Michael (1.563-1631), author of Polyolbiov ,\a. poetical descrip- 
tion of England and Wales. 

123. Drummond, William, of Hawthornden (1585-1649), author of sonnets 
and other short poems 

124. Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667), author of Poetical Blossomes, a collec- 
tion of poems published when he was only fifteen. 

128. Andrews, Launcelot (1565-1626), Bishop of Winchester, a celebrated 
Auglican theologian. 



ZZ SELECTIONS PEOM CHARLES LAMB. 

Milton almost requires a solemn service of mnsic to be 

130 played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, 
to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and 
purged ears. 

Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less of ceremony, 
the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, 
or his own Winter's Tale. 

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud to yourself, 
or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than 
one — and it degenerates into an audience. 
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for 

140 the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. 
I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels 
without extreme irksomeness. 

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the bank 
offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for 
one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to commence upon 
the Times or the Chronicle and recite its entire contents aloud, 
pro bono publico. With every advantage of lungs and elocu- 
tion, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' shops and 
public-houses a fellow will get up and spell out a paragraph, 

150 which he communicates as some discovery. Another follows 
with his selection. So the entire journal transpires at length 
by piece meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, a.nd, without 
this expedient, no one in the company would probaby ever 
travel through the contents of a whole paper. 

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one 
down without a feeling of disappointment. 

What an eternal time that gentleman in black at Nando's 
keeps the paper ! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling 
out incessantly, "The Chronicle is in hand, Sir." 

160 [As in these little diurnals I generally skip the Foreign 
News, the Debates, and the Politics, I find the Moroiing Herald 
by far the most entertaining of them. It is an agreeable mis- 
cellany rather than a newspaper.] 

147. Pro bono publico (Lat.) for the general good. 
157. Nando's, a cofifee house. 

160. Diurnals, journals. Both words are from Lat. diurnalis, but the 
second comes through the French. 



SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 23 

Coming into an inn at night — having ordered your supper — 
what can be more delightful than to find lying in the window- 
seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness Of some 
former guest— two or three numbers of the old Town and 
Country Magazine, with its amusing tete-a-tete jyiGtiiYes — " The 

Eoyal Lover and Lady G ;" ''The Melting Platonic and 

the old Beau," — and such-like antiquated scandal? Would 170 
you exchange it, — at that time, and in that place — for a better 
book. 

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much 
for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise Lost or 
Comus, he could have 7^ead to him— but he missed the pleasure 
of skimming over with his own eye a magazine, or a light 
pamphlet. 

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of 
some cathedral alone, and reading Candide. 

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having igo 
been once detected, by a familiar damsel, reclined at my ease 
upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera)' reading — 
Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a man seri- 
ously ashamed at the exposure ; but as she seated herself down 
by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could 
have wished it had. been — any other book. We read on very 
sociably for a few pages ; and, not finding the author much to 
her taste, she got up and went away. Gentle casuist I leave 
it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one 



168. Tete-a-tete (Fr.) head to head ; used of two persons conversing apart 
from others. 

173. Tobin, John (1?70-1804), a dramatist. Hisii/ehad been published two 
years before this Essay appeared. 

175. Paradise liost, or Comus, The fo mer, Milton's great epic, pub- 
lished 1667; the latter, a masque, acted at Ludlow Castle, 1634. 

179. Candide, a tale written by Voltaire to ridicule Christianity. 

182. Primrose Hill, north-west of London. 

182. Cythera. One of the Ionian Isles sacred to Venus. 

183. Pamela (1740). The first modern novel. It is in the form of letters. 
Pamela, the heroine, is a servant girl, whose virtue triumphs over great 
temptation. 

Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were the great eighteenth century 
novelists. 
188. Casuist, one who decides cases of conscience. 



24 SELECTIONS FROM CHAELES LAMB. 

between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in 
190 this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret. 

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot 
settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister who was 
generally to be seen upon Snow Hill (as yet Skinner's street 
was not) between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, 
studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a 
strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how 
he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiter- 
ate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would 
200 have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and 
have left me worse than indifferent to the five points. 

I was once amused— there is a pleasure in affecting affecta- 
tion — at the indignation of a crowd that was jostling in with 
me at the pit-door of Covent Garden Theater, to have a sight 
of Master Betty — then at once in his dawn and his meridian — 
in Hainlet. I had been invited, quite unexpectedly, to join a 
party, whom I met near the door of the playhouse, and I hap- 
pened to have in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and 
Steevens' Sliahespeare^ which, the time not admitting of my 
210 carrying it home, of course went with me to the theater. 
Just in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening — the 
rtish, as I term it — I deliberately held the volume over my 
head, open at the scene in which the young Koscius had been 
most cried up, and quietly read by the lamp-light. The 
clamor became universal. "The affectation of the fellow," 
cried one. " Look at that gentleman reading^ papa,'' squeaked 



190. Swain, a boy or servant. Swain and nymph are poetically used for 
man and woman 

191. Dileiiania, properly an argimient by which the opponent is caught 
between two conclusions, either of which be must admit, and both of which 
tell against him. 

194. Snow Hill, the old route from Holborn Bridge to Newgate, superseded 
by Skinner-street in 1802. 
196. Lardner, Nathaniel (1684-1768), a theologian of Unitarian views. 

198. Sidle, to move sideways. 

199. Porter's knot, a pad on the head to support burdens. 

201. Five Points, tlie leading tenets of Calvinists, Original Sin, Predes- 
tination, Irresistible Grace, Particular Redemption, Final Perseverance. 

205. Master Betty, a boy of thirteen, who appeared as a tragic actor at 
Covent Garden and excited great enthusiasm (1806-7). 

209. Johnson and Steevens. Johnson's edition of Shakespeare appeared 
in 1765, His work was united with that of Steevens some years later. 



SELECTIONS FUbM CHARLES LAMB. 25 

ii young lady, who, in her admiration of the novelty, almost 
foj-got her fears. I read on. " He ought to have his book 
knocked out of his hand," exclaimed a pursy cit, whose arms 
were too fast pinioned to his side to suffer him to execute his sao 
kind intention. Still I read on — and, till the time came to pay 
my money, kept as unmoved as St. Anthony at his holy offices, 
with the satyrs, apes, and hobgoblins, mopping and making 
mouths at him, in the picture, while the good man sits as un- 
disturbed at the sight as if he w^ere the sole tenant of the 
desert. The individual rabble (I recognized more than one of 
their ugly faces) had damned a slight piece of mine a few 
nights before, and I was determined the culprits should not a 
second tir^ie put me out of countenance. 

There is a class of street readers, whom I can never con- 230 
template without affection — the poor gentry, who, not having 
wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the 
open stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious 
looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have 
done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every 
moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable 
to deny themselves the gratification, they "snatch a fearful 

joy." Martin B , in this w\ay, by daily fragments, got 

through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped 
his laudable ambition by asking him (it was in his younger 240 
days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M, declares, 
that under no circumstance in his life did he ever peruse a 
book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy 

219, Pursy, short-winded. 

219. Cit, short for citizen or city man. 

222. St. Anthony (251-356), the founder of monapticism in the East. He is 
represented as hindered in his devotions by demons in various forms. 

223. Satyrs, Greek: wood-gods. 

223. Hobgoblin, specially applied to Puck or Robin Goodfellow. 
2-^3. Mopping-, grimacing^. 

227. Slight piece. Lamb's farce, entitled Mr. H . It failed from want 

of interest in the plot. 
238. Snatcli a fearful joy : 

" Still as they run, they look behind, 
They hear a voice in every wind, 
And snatch a fearful joy.'''' 

Gray's Ode on Eton College. 

238. Martin B , Martin Charles Burney, son of Admiral Burney. He 

died in 1853. 



26 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralized upon 
^'^5 this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas : 

THE TWO BOYS. 

I saw a boy with eager eye Of sufferings the poor have many 

Open a book upon a stall, Which never can the rich annoy. 

And read, as he'd devour it all; I soon perceived another boy, 

Which, when the stall man did Who look'd as if he had not any 

espy. Food— for that day at least— enjoy 

Soon to the boy I heard him call, The sight of cold meat in a tavern 
" You, sir, you never buy a book, larder. 

Therefore in one you shall not This boy's case, then, thought I, is 

look." surely harder. 

The boy pass'd slowly on, and with Thus hungry, longing, thus without 

a sigh a penny, 

He wished he had never been taught Beholding choice of dainty-dressed 

to read, meat; 

Then of the old churl's books he No wonder if he wish he ne'er had 

should have had no need. learn'd to eat. 



I The South Sea House. ^ 

Reader, in thy passage from the Bank — where thou hast been 
receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean 
annuitant like myself)— to the Flower Pot to secure a place 
for Dalston or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat 
northerly, — didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, 
handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left — where Thread- 
needle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate ? I dare say thou hast 
often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and 

244. Quaint poetess, Mary Lamb. This poem, entitled The Two Boys, is 
in the Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb. 

1. This was the house of business of the notorious South Sea Company, 
established in 1711, as a means of relieving the public burdens. This Com- 
pany undertook to pay the interest of the National Debt, and was granted in 
return the monopoly of a trade to the coast of Peru. The single voyage of 
one snip in 1717 was all the South Sea Trade attempted. Tn any history of 
the reign of George I., maybe read an account of the fraudulent proceedings, 
in consequence of which this speculation is known as the South Sea Bubble. 

2. Bank, Bank of England. 

4. Lean annuitant, one who draws a small yearly income. Contrast 
the expression 'a fat living." Lamb's salary in the India House was not 
small at the time this was written. But he writes in the character of Elia. 

4. Flower Pot, the inn from which started the coach for the North. 

5. Dalston or Shacklewell, north suburbs of London where the rents 
are low, hkely, in consequence, to be the residence of "lean annuitants." 

5. Some other thy, a construction common in Elizabethan dramatists, 
whose style Lamb often follows. 



SELECTIONS PRO^M CHARLES LAMB. 27 

disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters, and pillars, lo 
witli few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out — a desolation 
something like Balclutha's. 

This was once a house of trade — a center of busy interests. 
The throng of merchants was here — the quick pulse of gain — 
and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the 
soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porti- 
coes, imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments 
in palaces— deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling 
clerks ; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee- 
rooms with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers— directors ao 
seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend) 
at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with 
tarnished, gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver ink- 
stands long since dry ; — the oaken wainscots hung with pic- 
tures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen 
Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty ; 
— huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated: 
dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, — and soundings of the 
Bay of Panama ! The long passages hung with buckets, ap- 
pended in idle row to walls, whose substance might defy any, 30 
short of the last, conflagration : — with vast ranges of cellarage 
under all, where dollars and pieces-of-eight once lay, an " un- 
sunned heap " for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart 
withal, — long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the 
blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble. 



12. Balclutha. " I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were deso- 
late." Ossian (Lamb's note). Balclutha means Toimi on the Clyde. 
29. Buckets, to be employed in case of Are 

32. Pieces of eight. The Spanish coin piastre, so called as worth eight 
reals. The dollar of the United States was taken from this, and is of about 
the same value. 

33. Unsunned heap, hidden hoai'd, which the sun does not shine on. 

" You may as well spread out the unsunned heaps 
Of misers' treasure by an outlaw's den, 
And tell me it is safe, as bid me hope, 
Danger will wink on opportunity." 

Milton's Comus, 1. 398. 

33. Mammon. The Syrian's god of riches. Probably suggested to Lamb 
by the word "unsunned," for Spenser describes Mammon as '"sunning his 
treasure hoar." Foerir Qneeve. ii. 7. 

35. Bubble. The South Sea Bubble. See note L 



28 SELECTIONS FEOM CHARLES LAMB. 

Such is the South Sea House. At least, such it was forty 
years ago when I knew it — ^^a magnificent relic ! What altera- 
tions may have been made in it since, I have had no opportu- 
nities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, lias not fresh- 

4oenedit. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping 
waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The 
moths, that were then battenmg upon its obsolete ledgers and 
day-books, have rested from iheir depredations, but other 
light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among 
their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumu- 
lated upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, 
save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to ex- 
plore the mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign; or, 
with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the 

so mysteries of that tremendous hoax, whose extent the petty 
peculators of our day look back upon with the same expres- 
sion of incredulous admiration, and hopeless ambition of 
rivalry, as would become the puny face of modern conspiracy, 
contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot. 

Peace to the manes of the Bubble ! Silence and destitution 
are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial ! 

Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living 
commerce — amid the fret and fever of speculation — with the 
Bank and the 'Change, and the India-house about thee, in the 

60 hey-day of present prosj^erity, with their important faces, as 



37. Wlieii I knew it. Lamb had been employed there for a short time 
some thirty years before the publication at this Essay. Elia too, in whose 
name it was written, held a subordinate post there. 

42. Battening;, to batten (from bat., root of better) signifies to groiv fat, 
feed luxuriantly. 

44. Fretwork. The pages eaten through by moths would have this ap- 
pearance. 

50. Tremendous hoax. The South Sea scheme. 

54. Titan-size, like a Titan, gigantic. In the same sense we generally say 
colossal. 

54. Vaux. Guido Vaux. or Guy Fawkes, the agent of the conspirators for 
blowing up the Houses of Parliament, 1C05. 

55. Manes, a Latin word signifying benevolent spirits as opposed to the 
larvae and lemures ; also the souls of the dead. The latter sense is of course 
that of the text. 

59. 'Change, an abbreviation commonly used for the Royal Exchange. 

59. India House. Offices of the East India Company founded 1000. It 
governed India until 1858, when its authority was transferred to the Crown. 

60. Hey-day. The interjection he y-d(i>/ is from Ger. heida : the mode of 
spelling is probably due to a supposed coniaection with high-day. 



SELECTIOJS^S FH&M CHARLES LAMB. 29 

it were, insulting thee, their poo?' neighbor out of business — 
to the idle and merely contemplative, — to such as me, old 
house ! there is a charm in thy quiet : — a cessation — a coolness 
from business — an indolence almost cloistral — which is delight- 
ful ! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms 
and courts at eventide! They spoke of the past : — the shade 
of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit 
by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle 
me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, 
which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could 70 
lift from their enshrining shelves — with their old fantastic 
flourishes, and decorative rubric interlacings — their sums in 
triple columniatious, set down with formal superfluity of 
ciphers — with pious sentences at the beginning, without which 
our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of busi- 
ness, or bill of lading — the costly vellum covers of some of 
them almost persuading us that we are got into some better 
library^ — are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can 
look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. The 
heavy odd- shaped ivory-handled pen-knives (our ancestors had 80 
everything on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as 
good as anything from Herculaneum. The pounce boxes of 
our days have gone retrograde. 

The very clerks which I remember in the South Sea House 
— I speak of forty years back — had an air very different from 
those in the public olRces that I have had to do with since. 
They partook uf the genius of the place ! 

69. Tomes, volumes. 

72. Rubric. Lat. rubricn, red chalk, and then the title of a law because 
written in i-ed. Lamb here uses the word as an adjective. 

73. Triple coluuiniations. The three columns, £ s. d 

74 Superfluity of cipiiers, 00, when there was nothing to record in one 
of the columns. 

78. Better library. Perhaps suggested by the phrase " better world." 
The binding gave them the air of something better than ledgers. 

79. Defunct dragons. The ledgers no longer in use. " Living accounts," 
he says above, puzzled him. They were like live dragons. 

8'<J Herculaneum. This town, Pompeii and Stabies were overwhelmed 
by an eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79. They remained buried beneath sand 
and ashes until after 1700. 

S2. Pounce boxi^s, boxes with perforated lid for sprinkling pounce or 
powder (originally powdered pumice stone) to dry ink. 

83. Retrograde, backwards ; an adj. used adverbially. The pounce boxes 
were smaller than of yore 



30 SELECTIONS FKOM CIIAELES LAMB. 

They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of 
superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not 
90 much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. 
Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned before. Humorists, 
for they were of all descriptions ; and, not having been 
brought together in early life (which has a tendency to assimi- 
late the members of corporate bodies to each other), but for 
the most part placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they 
necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, 
unqualified, if 1 may so speak, as into a common stock. 
Hence they formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay- 
monastery. Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more 
icxjfor show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat — and 
not a few among them had arrived at considerable proficiency 
on the German flute. 

Tlie cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. 
He had something of the choleric complexion of his country- 
men stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at 
bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed 
out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in carica- 
tures of what were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies. 
He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib- 
no cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him, mak- 
ing up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if 
he feared every one about him was a defaulter ; in his hypo- 
chondry ready to imagine himself one ; haunj-ed, at least, with 
the idea of the possibility of his becoming one; his tristful 

89. Baclielors. They were too poor to marry. 

91. Reason mentioned before. Six lines higher, "I speak of forty 
years back." 

103. Evans. Six clerks are described, and two merely mentioned. 

103. Cambro-Briton, a Welshman. Cambria, the ancient name of Wales. 

108. Maccaronies. A name given to fops in the last century; dandies, 
swells, mashers, are their successors. The term is said to be derived from 
the Maccaronic Club, which was formed by gentlemen who had traveled in 
Italy, and who introduced into England the use of maccaroni. 

110. Gib-cat, a he-cat. Gib is short for Gilbert. So we say a tom-cat. 

" I am as melancholy as a gib cat." 

Henry IV., Part i., i., 2, 78. 

111. Cash, orig. a case or chest for money ; then the money. 

113. Hypochontlry The usual word is hiipochondria, which means under 
the cartilages, then the digestive organs generally, and a derangement oi 
them causing melancholy. 

114. One, i.e., a defaulter. 



SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 31 

visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Ander- 
ton's at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before 
his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he 
had frequented for the last iive-and-twenty years), but not at- 
taining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on 
the hour of tea and visiting. The simultaneous sound of his 120 
well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock an- 
nouncing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families 
which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. 
Then was h\s, forte his glorified hour ! How would he chirp, 
and expand, over a muffin ! How would he dilate into secret 
history! His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, 
could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new 
London — the site of old theaters, churches, streets gone to 
decay — where Kosamond's pond stood — the Mulberry gardens 
— and the Conduit in Cheap — with many a pleasant anecdote, 130 
derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures 
which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of N0071 — the 
worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to 
this country from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his ~ 
dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the shelter- 
ing obscurities of Hog-lane and the vicinity of the Seven Dials. 

115. Tristful visage. Another Shakespearian expression, " With tristful 
visage." Hamlet, iii. 4, 51. Tristful (Lat. tristia) means sad, 

116. Anderton's. A coffee-house. 

119. Not attaining:. This refers to the " tristful visage." 

126. His countryman, Pennant. Thomas Pennant C1726-1798). a Welsh 
antiquarian and naturalist. Among his minor works was •' Some Account of 
London,'''' which is alluded to in the text. 

129. Rosamond's pond. A pond in St. James's Park, filled up in 1770. 
Pope mentions it at the end of the Rape of the Lock — 

•' This the blest lover shall for Venus take, 
And send up vows from Rosamonda's lake." 

129. Mulberry gardens. Public gardens frequented in the time of the 
Stuarts, so called from mulberry trees planted by James I, They are now 
the gardens of Buckingham Palace. 

18 >. Conduit in Ciieap. Cheap meant a sale or bargain. Cheapside was 
a market place. Formerly there v/as a conduit or water-course there. 

132. Hogarth (1697-1764). An English engraver and painter. His pictures 
are chiefly in series, intended to satirize some class or custom, with a good 
moral end in view. 

132. Picture of Noon. This is one of a series. The scene is a French 
Huguenot chapel in Hog lane. 

133. Heroic confessors. French Protestants who had taken refuge in 
London in consequence of the dnt.gonnades of Louis XIV. and the Kevoca- 
tion of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. 

136. Seven Dials. The meeting of seven streets in London. A column 
with seven sun-dials was the origin of the name. In this neighborhood 
many French refugees settled. 



32 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air 
and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, 
had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster 

140 Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body for- 
wards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect 
of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of 
their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt 
strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, 
you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance 
of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was 
of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a 
proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. 
A sucking-babe might have posed him. What was it then ? 

150 Was he rich ? Alas, no ! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both 
he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all 
was not well at all times within. She had a neat meager per- 
son, which it was evident she had not sinned in overpamper- 
ing ; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, 
by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly 
understood, — much less can explain with any heraldic certainty 
at this time of day, — to the illustrious, but unfortunate house 
of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. 
This was the thought — the sentiment— the bright solitary star 

160 of your lives, ye mild and happy pair, — which cheered you in 
the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station ! 
This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of 
glittering attainments : and it was worth them all together. 
You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece 
of defensive armor only, no insult likewise could reach you 
through it. Becus et solamen. 

13T. Thomas Tame was deputy cashier in 1793 in succession to Evans. 
140. Westminster Hall. Built by William II.; now used as an entrance 
to the Houses of Parliament. 

148. White paper. The comparison used by Locke to illustrate the condi- 
tion of the human mind before the use of the senses. He denied the existence 
of innate ideas. 

149. Posed, puzzled by putting a question (Fr. poser, to put). 

15S. Derwentwater.' The last Earl of Derwentwater was executed in 1716, 
for having: supported the Pretender in the preceding year. 

158. Secret of Thomas's stoop. Lamb mentioned above that Tame had 
the stoop of a nobleman. 

166. Decus et solamen (Lat), glory and comfort. 



SELECTIONS rR(OM CHARLES LAMB. 33 

Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. 
He neither pretended to high blood, nor, in good truth, cared 
one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the 
greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest ac- 170 
countant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The 
fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with 
other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream 
and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of ofiicial rooms 
in Threadneedle-street, which, without anything very substan- 
tial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions 
of himself that lived in them (I know not who is the occupier 
of them now), resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert 
of sweet " breasts," as our ancestors would have called them, 
culled from club rooms and orchestras — chorus singers — first 180 
and second violoncellos — double basses — and clarionets —who 
ate his cold mutton and drank his punch, and praised his ear. 
He sat like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp 
was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that 

167. The then accountant, John Tipp. He was accountant in 1792. 
His successor in the ofiSce of Deputy Accountant was John Lamb, the author's 
brother. 

169. Cared one fig. In this expression fig = fico, a fiilip. The transition 
form is seen in Shalcespeare — 

' ' Figo for thy friendship. ' ' 

Henry V., iii., 6, 57. 
171. Hobby, an ambling nag, a toy like a horse, a favorite pursuit. 
173. Orphean lyre. A reminiscence of Milton — 

" With other notes than to th' Orphean lyre 
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night." 

Paradise Lost, iii., 17. 
177. Occupier. VVTien this essay first appeared, there was a note here, 
afterwards suppressed—" I have since been informed that the present tenant 
of thera is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of some 
choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, which I mean to 
do myself the pleasure of going to see, and, at the same time, to refresh my 
memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr. Lamb has the character of a right 
courteous and communicative collector " This was John Lamb, of whom, 
and of whose love for pictures, we read more in the essay on My Relations. 

179. Breasts. Used in Elizabethan writers for ability in singing— 

" By my troth, the fool hath an excellent breast." 

Twelfth Night, ii., 3, 19. 

180. Culled, collected. Both words come from Latin colligere. 

183. lL.ike L.ord Midas, i.e., without any skill in judging. "Justice Midas, 
in a play by Kane O'Hara (1764), awards the prize for singing to Pan : the 
other competitor turns out to be Apollo. In the classical story. Midas is 
King of Phrygia, the same whose touch turned everything into gold. He 
received asses' ears from Apollo, because he maintained that that god wag 
surpassed in singing and flute-playing by Pan. 



34 SELECTIONS FKOM CHARLES LAMB. 

were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak 
of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. 
A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The 
whole duty of the man consisted in writing off dividend war- 
rants. The striking of the annual balance in the company's 

190 books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year 
in the sum of £25 Is. Qd.) occupied his days and nights for a 
month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of 
things (as they called them in the city) in his beloved house, 
or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when 
South Sea hopes were young — (he was indeed equal to tlie 
wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most flour- 
ishing company in these or those days): — but to a genuine ac- 
countant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The frac- 
tional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which 

200 stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part 
be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With 
Tipp, form was everything. His life was formal. . His actions 
seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than 
his heart. He made the best executor in the world ; he was 
plagued with incessant executorships accordingly, which ex- 
cited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He 

- would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose 
rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the 
dying hand that commended their interests to his protection. 

210 With all this there was about him a sort of timidity— (his few 
enemies used to give it a worse name)— a something which, in 
reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on 
this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to 
endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of 
self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not de- 
spise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its ele- 
ments; it betrays itself, not you; it is mere temperament; the 
absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in 
the way, and will not, with Fortinbras " greatly find quarrel 



211. "Worse name, cowardice. 

219. Fortinbras. Hamlet is informed that Fortinbras is leading his army 
"to gain a little patch of ground " which is of no value. He feels this a re- 



SELECTIONS FRCiM CHARLES LAMB. 35 

in a straw," when some supposed honor is at stake. Tippsao 
never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned 
against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a 
parapet; or looked down a precipice ; or let off a gun; or went 
upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go, if he could 
have helped it : neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre 
or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. 

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom 
common qualities become uncommon ? Can I forget thee, 
Henry Man the wit, the polished man of letters, the autho7\ 
of the South Sea House ? who never enteredst thy office in a 230 
morning, or quittedst it in midday--(what didst thou in an 
office ?) — without some quirk that left a sting ! Thy gibea 
and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten 
volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall 
in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, 
epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these 
fastidious days — thy topics are staled by the " new-born 
gauds" of the time: — but great thou used to be in Public 



proof of bis own neglect to avenge his father's death. For mere honor men 
will fight about a straw — 

" Rightly to be great, 
Is not to stir without great argument, 
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw, 
When honor's at the stake." 



227. Dusty dead. Cf. Macbeth, v., 5, 



Hamlet, iv., 4, 53, 



" And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death." 

229. Henry Man, Deputy Secretary in 1793. 
232. Quirk, a quick turn, cavil, subtle question. 

232. Gibes, taunts, sneers. It is from a root meaning mouth. Gabble, 
gobble, jabber, are from the same root. 

234. Two forgotten volumes. These do not seem to be now extant. 

235. Barbican. Here Milton was hving in 1645 and sheltered some of the 
cavalier relations of his wife. 

237. Staled, rendered old fashioned: 

" Age cannot wither her nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety." 

Antony and Cleopatra, ii., 2, 240. 

238. New-born gauds. A gaud is an ornament, a trifle. 

" One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, 
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gawds 
Though they are made and molded of things past." 

Troilus and Cressida^ iii., 3, 175, 



36 SELECTIONS FBOM CHAELES LAMB. 

• 

Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, 
240 and Eockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and 
the war which ended in the tearing from Great Britain her 
rebellious colonies, — and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, 
and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond — and such 
small politics. 

A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, 
was fine rattling, rattle-headed Plumer. He w'^as descended 
— not in a right line, reader (for his lineal pretensions, like 
his personal, favored a little of the sinister bend), from the 

Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out ; and 

, * 

239. Public Lie<lger and Chronicle, newspapers of the last century. 
239. Chatham (1708-1778), WUliani Pitt, made Earl of Chatham 1766. His 
second son was the William Pitt famous at the end of the century. 

239. Shelburne (1737-1805), William Petty, second Earl of Shelburne. 
afterwards Marquis of Lansdowne. As Prime Minister in 1782 he arranged 
the treaty which recognized American independence. 

240. Rockingham (1730-1782), Charles Wentworth, Marquis of Rocking- 
ham, was Prime Minister in 1765 and again"- in 1782. He died in office, and 
was succeeded by Shelburne. 

240. Howe. There were two brothers. Sir William Howe, a General in the 
war with the American colonies, who died in 1814, and Richard, Earl Howe, 
the Admiral, who gained the briUiant rvictory over the French offUshant 
1794, and died 1799. The General is probably meant here, as the other names 
are those of persons noted in connection with the American war of independ- 
ence. 

240. Burgoyne, John, an Enghsh General, who surrendered to the Amer- 
ican colonists at Saratoga in 1777. 

240. Clinton, Sir Henry, another English General in the same war. 

241. The war. It began in April 1775 with a skirmish at Lexington, and 
was practically over after the capitulation of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, 
October, 1781. The British losses in the field during the war are estimated at 
25,000 men; those of the Americans at 8,000. 

242. Keppel. An English Admiral. 

242. Wilkes, John (1727-1797), editor of the North Britain, in the 45th 
number of which (1763) he charged the king with uttering a falsehood from 
the throne. He was arrested on a general warrant, but liberated as being a 
member of Parliament. He obtained £1,000 damages, and general warrants 
were declared illegal. 

248. Sawbridge and Bull, Lord Mayors of London in the last century. 

243. Dunning, John (1731-1783), author of the motion carried in the House 
of Commons, 1780, " that the influence of the crown has increased, is increas- 
ing, and ought to be diminished." He was raised to the peerage with the title 
of Ashburton. 1782. 

243. Pratt, Charles (1713-1794). As Chief Justice he ordered the release of . 
Wilkes, and .declared general warrants to be illegal. He was made Lord 
Chancellor in 1766, and ultimately Earl of Camden. 

243. Richmond. Perhaps a member of the Rockingham ministry is 
meant. 

246. Plumer, Richard, Deputy Secretary in the South Sea House in 1800. 

248. Sinister bend, a stripe extending diagonally across a shield beginning 
at the top corner which is to the left (Lat. sinister) of the person weariog the 
shield. This kind of bend denotes illegitimacy. 

249. Plumers of Hertford.shire. Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, 
had been housekeeper to this family at Bla,keswai-e. He mentions her in the 
essay on Dream Children. Walter' Plumer was not the bachelor-uncle that 
Lamb calls him, if we are to believe the existing pedigree of the family. 



SELECTIONS ERQM CHARLES LAMB. 37 

certain family features not a little sanctioned the opinion. 250 
Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a 
rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, and had seen the 
world. He was uncle, bachelor-uncle, to the fine old Whig- 
still living, who has represented the county in so many suc- 
cessive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware. 
Walter flourished in George the Second's days, and was the 
same who was summoned before the House of Commons about 
a business of franks, with the old Duchess of Marlborough. 
You may read of it in Johnson's Life of Cave. Cave came off 
cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing 260 
to discountenance the rumor. He rather seemed pleased 
whenever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. But, be- 
sides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fellow, 
and sang gloriously. 

Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, childlike, 

pastoral M ; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering 

than thy Arcadian raelodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, 
thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished 
Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for 

a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M , the 370 

unapproachable churchwarden of Bishopsgate. He knew not 
what he did when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring 
of blustering winter: — only unfortunate in thy ending, which 
should have been mild, conciliatory, swan-like. 

251. Author. Here equivaJent to father, 

255. Ware. A town in Hertfordshire where still exists the great "Bed of 
Ware," which is twelve feet square. 

258. Business of franks. This alludes to the privilege which members 
of Parliament had of sending their letters free by post. The system of frank- 
ing was restricted in 1837, and abolished in 1840 on the establishment of the 
penny post. 

261" Kumor. Ot his connection with the Hertfordshire family. 

266. Pastoral M. T. Maynard, Chief Clerk of the Old Annuities and 
Three-per-Cents. from 1786 to 1793, 

267 Arcadian. Pastoral ; from Arcadia in the Peloponnesus, a pastoral 
region. 

267, Arden. The forest of Arden in France is the scene of much of 
Shakespeare's As Yoit Like It. 

268 Song- sung by Amiens :— 

" Blow, blow, thou winter wind, 
Thou art not so unkind 
As man's ingratitude."— ^s You Like It, ii,, 7, 174. 

273. IJnfortunate in tliy ending Maynard hanged himself. 

274. Swau-like- The ancient poetc^ supposed that swans sang their own 
dirge. Ct Merchant of Venice, iii., 2, 44 

'• Then if he lose be makes a swan- like end, 
Fadifg in music," ♦ 



o8 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise np, but 
they must be mine in private: — already I have fooled the 
reader to the top of his bent;— else could I omit that strange 
creature Woollet, who existed in trying the question, and 
hought litigations ?— and still stranger, inimitable, solemn 
«8oHepworth, from whose gravity Newton might have deduced 
the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen 
— with what deliberation would he wet a wafer ! 

But it is time to close— night's wheels are rattling fast over 
me — it is proper to have done with this solemn mocJ^ery. 

Keader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while ? 
— peradventure, the very names which I have summoned up 
before thee are fantastic— insubstantial— like Henry Pimpernel 
and old John Naps of Grreece. 

Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a 
290 being. Their importance is from the past. 

277. Top of liis beiit. As far as he will bear; the greatest bend that can 
be given the bow without breaking it. 

" Th.ey fool me to the top of my bent." 

Hamlet, iii., 2, 385. 

278. Trying the question. Solving legal diflBenlties. 

279. Bought litigations. Buying another's interest in a lawsuit on the 
chance of being successful. 

280. Newton, Sir Isaac (1649-1727). He discovered the law of universal 
gravitation, which was explained in his great work the FrincipLa, pubhshed 
1687 

281. Gravity. . . . gravitation. One of the few puns to be found in 
these essays, though in Lamb's letters and conversation they formed a prom- 
inent feature. , , ^ , . ,. . ^ ,. 

283. Night's wheels. Night was supposed to travel m a chariot from 
east to west between sunset and sunrise. 

285. Playing with thee. Lamb is so fond of mystification that when he 
gives facts" he tries to make them pass for fiction. 

287. Henry Pimpernel In the Induction to the Taming of the 

Shrew, these are mentioned as not existing, 

"Why, sir, you know no house, nor no such maid, 
Nor no such men, as you have reckon'd up,— 
As Stephen Sly, and old John Naps of Gh'eece, 
And Peter Turf, and Henry PimperveU, 
And twenty more such names and men as these, 
■Which never were, nor no man ever saw." 

TO/ming of the Bhrew, Induction, Scene 2, 91. 



SELECTIONS FKOM CHARLES LAMB. 39 

I 



Old China. 

I HAVE an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I 
go to see any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and 
next for the picture-gallery. I cannot defend the order of 
preference, but by saying that we have all some taste or other, 
of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly 
that it was an acquired one. 1 can call to mind the first play, 
and the first exhibition, that I was taken to ; but I am not 
conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were intro- 
duced into my imagination. 

I had no repugnance then — why should I now have? — toio 
those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under 
the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed 
by any element, in that world before perspective — a china 
tea-cup. 

I like to see my old friends — whom distance cannot dimin- 
ish— figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet 
on terra finna still, for so we must in courtesy interpret that 
speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent 
absurdity, had made to spring up beneath their sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if pos- 20 
sible, with still more womanish expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a 
lady from a salver — two miles off. See how distance seems to 
set off respect ! And here the same lady, or another — for 
likeness is identity on tea-cups — is stepping into a little fairy 
boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, 



12. Notion. The word likeness would not suit ; they are so unlike. 

13. Perspective. The art of representing objects on a plane surface so as 
to make them appear at their proper distances. More distant objects must 
be drawn smaller in proportion. The Chinese do not observe this * therefore 
Lamb's expression : ' whom distance cannot diminish ' 

17. Terra finna. Steady ground, opposed to sea or air. 
22. Mandarin. A Chinese governor of a province. 
?6. Hitlier side. The side nearer to the spectator. 



40 ' SELECTIONS FROM CH.\.RLES LAMB. 

with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of inci- 
dence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in. 
the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong off on the other side 

30 of the same strange stream ! 

Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their world 
— see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. 

Here — a cow and rabbit cou chant and co-extensive — so ob- 
jects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. 
I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our 
Hyson (which we are old-fashioned enough to drink un- 
mixed still of an afternoon), some of these speciosa mwacida 
upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) 
w^hich we were now for the first time using ; and could not' 

40 help remarking, how favorable circumstances had been to us 
of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes 
with trifles of this sort — w-hen a passing sentiment seemed to 
overshade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detect- 
ing these summer clouds in Bridget. 

" I wish the good old times would come again," she said, 
" when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want 
to be poor ; but there was a middle state"— so she was pleased 
to ramble on — "in which I am sure we were a great deal hap- 
pier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money 

50 enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. 
When we coveted a cheap luxury (and O ! how much ado I had 
to get you to consent in those times !) — we were used to have 



27. Mincing. Cutting up small, taking very short steps 

28. Angle of incidence. Properly the angle formed by one object striking 
another, a mathematical term. The meaning here is that a line drawn in 
the direction the foot is taking, would terminate a furlong off ; no mincing 
step. 

32. Pagoda. (¥ort. pagoda. Pers. butkadah an idol-temple.) 

32. Hays. An old English dance. 

33. Couchant. A term of heraldry, lying down with head raised. 

33. Co-extensive. Drawn the same size. 

34. Catliay. Chinese Tartaiy, called Khitai by the Tartars. The word is 
used by TennysoB in Locksley Hall. 

' Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.' 

35. My cou.si n . Bridget Elia, the reference being as elsewhere to Mary 
Lamb, the author's sister. 

36. Hyson, a kind of green tea, named from the season of its gathering. 
The word in Chinese means spring-time. 

37. Specio.sa niiracula CL.) beautiful wonders. An exDression used by 
Horace of the stories of the Odyssey. 



SELECTIONS PROM CHARLES LAMB. 41 

i 

debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and 
against, iind think what we might spare it out of, and what 
saving we could hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A 
thing was worth buying then when we felt the money that we 
paid for it. 

" Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang 
upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew 
so threadbare — and all because of that folio Beaumont and 60 
Fletcher which you dragged home late at night from Barker's 
m Covent Garden ? Do you remember how we eyed it for 
weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, 
and had not come to a determination till it was near ten 
o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, 
fearing you should be too late — and when the old bookseller 
with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling 
taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from 
his dusty treasures, and when you lugged it home, wishing it 
were twice as cumbersome — and when you presented it to 70 
me — and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collat- 
ing, you called it), and while I was repairing some of the 
loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suf- 
fei'- to be left till day-break, was there no pleasure in being a 
poor man ? or can those neat black clothes which you wear 
now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become 
rich and finical — give you half the honest vanity with which 
you flaunted it about in that overworn suit — your old corbeau 
— for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to 
pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen or six- 80 
teen shillings was it ? — a great affair we thought it then — 
which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford 

60. Folio l?eauinont and Fletcher. See 'Essay on Detached Thoughts, 
note 97, p. 20. 

65. Islington. Lamb was not there at the time referred to ; but for a 
few years before this Essay was written, he used occasionally to retire to a 
rural lodging at Dalston. In August, 1823, he became a householder for the 
first time, taking a cottage in Colebrook Row, Islington. 

68. Taper . . . bedwards. Perhaps an echo of — 

" And tapers burn'd to bedward." 

Coriolanus, i , 6, 32. 
71. Collating. Comparing different texts of a work. 
78. Corbeau. French for raven ; applied to an old coat. 



42 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you 
ever bring me home any nice old purchases now. 

' ' When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out 
a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, 
which we christened the " Lady Blanche; " when you looked 
at the purchase, and thought of the money — and thought of the 
money, and looked again at the picture — was there no pleasure 

90 in being a poor man ? Now, you have nothing to do but to 
walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. 
Yet do you ? 

" Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, 
and Potter's bar, and Waltham, when we had a holiday — hol- 
idays and all other fun are gone now we are rich— and the 
little handbasket in which I used to deposit our day's fare of 
savory cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about 
at noontide for some decent house, where we might go in and 
produce our store — only paying for the ale that you must call 

100 for — and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and 
whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth — and wish for 
such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has described 
many a one on the banks of the Lea, when he wenta-fishing — 
and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and some- 
times they would look grudgingly upon us — but we had cheer- 
ful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food 
savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall ? Now, 
when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom, more- 
over, we ride part of the way, and go into a fine inn, and or- 

110 der the best of dinners, never debating the expense, which, af- 
ter all, never has half the rehsh of those chance country snaps, 

86 Lionardo (1452-1519) called da Vinci, from the place of his birth in 
the Val d'Aruo. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and exhib- 
ited talent for music and poetry. Among his paintings may be mentioned 
the Last supper, a fresco, and the Battle of the standard, a cartoon. He 
wrote a Treatise on Painting. Lionardo da Vinci is one who may take rank 
with Raphael and Michael Angelo. 

91. Wilderness of Lionardos. Suggested by Shylock's remark: "I 
would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys." 

102. Izaak Walton (159.'j-1683) author of the'Coviplete Angler: a work 
noted for its descriptions of rural scenery. The Lea is a tributai-y of the 
Thames, in which he often fished. Piscator the angler, and Viator the 
traveler, are characters of the Complete Angler. Trout HaU was an inn 
wnere they met. 



SELECTIOI^^S FROM CHARLES LAMB. 43 

I 

when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precar- 
ious welcome. 

" You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the 
pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit when we 
saw the Battle of Hexam and the Surrender of Calais, and 
Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood- 
when we squeezed out our shilling a-piece to sit three or four 
times in a season in the one-shilling gallery — where you felt 
all the time that you ought not to have brought me— and 120 
more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought- me — 
and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and when 
the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the house, 
or what mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts 
were with Kosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the court of 
Illyria ? You used to say that the gallery was the best place 
of all for enjoying a play socially — that the relish of such ex- 
hibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going — 
that the company we met there, not being in general readers 
of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to 130 
what was going on, on the stage — because a word lost would 
have been a chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill 
up. With such reflections we consoled our pride then — and I 
appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met generally with less 
attention and accommodation than I have done since in more 
expensive situations in the house ? The getting in, indeed, 
and the crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad 
enough — but there was still a law of civility to woman recog- 
nized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in the other 
passages — and how a little difficulty overcome heightened the 140 
snug seat and the play, afterwards ! Now we can only pay 
our money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the gal- 



116. Battle of Hexam and Surrender of Calais, comedies by George 
Colman the younger (1762-1836), 

117. Bannister, John (1760-1836), a comic actor. 

117. Mrs. Bland, an actress at the beginning of the present century. 
117, Children in tlie Wood (1815), a comedy by Thomas Morton (1764- 
1838) 
1^5. Rosalind in Arden. Shakespeare's As You Like It. 
125. Viola at tlie Court of Illyria. Shakesiteeire'' s Twelfth Night. 



44 SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 

leries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enong 
then — but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty 

" There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before the 
became quite common — in the first dish of peas, while the; 
were yet dear — to have them for a nice supper, a treat. Wha 
treat can we have now ? If we were to treat ourselves now— 
that is to have dainties a little above our means, it would be 

150 selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we alio 
ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that make 
what I call a treat — when two people, living together as we 
have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap lux- 
ury which both like ; while each apologizes, and is willing to 
take both halves of the blame to his single share. I see 'no 
harm in people making much to themselves, in that sense of 
the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of 
others. But now — what I mean by the word — we never do 
make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do 

160 not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, just 
above poverty. ■ 

"1 know what you were going to say, that it is mighty 
pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet, — and much 
ado we used to have every Thirty-first Night of December to 
account for our exceedings — many a long face did you make 
over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out 
how we had spent so much, or that we had not spent so much, 
or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year J 
and still we found our slender capital decreasing — but then — 

170 betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort or 
another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without 
that for the future, and the hope that youth brings, and laugh- 
ing spirits (in which you were never poor till now), we pock- 
eted up our loss, and in conclusion, with ' lusty brimmers,' 
(as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton^ as 



174. Lusty brimmers, glasses filled to the brim The expression is from 
lines entitled The Neio Year, by Charles Cotton (1630-1687), a burlesque poet 
and angler. 



SELECTIONS FROM CHARLES LAMB. 45 

I 

you called him), we used to welcome in the 'coming guest.' 
Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year — 
no flattering promises about the new year doing better for 
us." 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that iSo 
when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I inter- 
rupt it, I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of 
wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a 

clear income of poor hundred pounds a year. "It is true 

we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also 
younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the 
excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we 
should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to 
struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be 
most thankful. It strengthened and knit our compact closer, 190 
We could never have been what we have been to each other, if 
we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of. 
The resisting power — those natural dilations of the youthful 
spirit which circumstances cannot straiten — with us are long 
since passed away. Competence to age is supplementary 
youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is 
to be had. We must ride where we formerly walked ; live 
better and lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we had 
means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could 
those days return — could you and I once more walk our thirty 200 
miles a day — could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, 
and you and I be young to see them — could the good old one- 
shilling gallery days return— they are dreams, my cousin, now 
■ — but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet 
argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxuri- 
ous sofa— be once more struggling up those inconvenient stair- 
cases, pushed about and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest 
rabble of poor gallery scramblers — could I once more hear 



176, Coining guest :— 

" True friendship's laws are by this rule expressed, 
Welcome the coming, ^peed the parting guest.''' 

Pope's Odyssey, xv.. 83. 

The second line is quoted hy Lamb in the Essay on Netv Year's Eve. 



46 SELECTIONS FEOM CHARLES LAMB. ^^ 

those anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious Tlimik Om 
2IO we are safe^ which always followed when the topmost stair, 
conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheerful theater 
down beneath us— I know not the fathom line that ever 
touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more 
wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R is sup- 
posed to have, to purchase it. 

" And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter 
holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the 
head of that pretty insipid half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady 
220 in that very blue summer-house." 

214. Croesus. A king of Lydia in the sixth century b. c. noted for his 
wealth. 
214. K , Rothschild. 

217. Bed-tester. Canopy over a bed (O. F. testiere, a head piece, from 
teste a head, L. testa). 

218. Madonna-ish, like a Madonna in a pictvire. 

218. Chit (A. S. cith), a shoot or bud, then a forward child. 



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Chaucer's The Knig^htes Tale. With portrait and bio- 
graphical sketch of author, essay on his language, history of the English language 
to time of Chaucer, glossary, and full explanatory notes. Bound in boards. MaiU 
ing price, 40 cents. 

Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. With biographical 

sketch of author, introduction, dedication, Garrick's Prologue, epiiogue and three 
intended epilogues, and full explanatory notes. Bound in boards. Mailing price, 
30 centt. 

Full DEScmPTivE Catalogue sent on application. 



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